contempt of others in comparison with oneself. In order, therefore, that
they may be delivered from their imaginary belief, they are sent down
from heaven and let back into the evils which they pursued in the world;
they are also shown that they are in hereditary evils of which they had
not known. When they have been led in this way to realize that their
evils have not been separated from them but only put aside, thus that in
themselves they are impure, indeed nothing but evil, and that they are
withheld from evils and held in goods by the Lord, and that this only
seems to be their doing, they are raised again into heaven by the Lord.

[4] Second: _It is an error of the age to believe that the state of man's
life can be changed in a moment, so that from wicked he can become good,
and consequently can be led from hell and transported at once to heaven,
and this by the Lord's direct mercy._ Those who separate charity and
faith and place salvation in faith alone, commit this error. For they
suppose that merely to think and speak formulas of that faith, if it is
done with trust and confidence, justifies and saves one. Many think it is
done instantly, too, and if not previously, can be done in the last hour
of one's life. These are bound to believe that the state of man's life
can be changed in a moment and that he can be saved by direct mercy. But
in the last chapter of this treatise it will be seen that the Lord's
mercy is mediated, that man cannot become good in a moment from being
wicked, and can be led from hell and transported to heaven only by the
continual activity of divine providence from infancy to the very close of
life. Here it need only be said that all the laws of divine providence
have the salvation and reformation of the human being for their object,
in other words, the inversion of his state, which by nativity is
infernal, into the opposite, which is heavenly. This can only be done
progressively as man recedes from evil and its enjoyment and comes into
good and its enjoyment.